NBC CEO: We Could Have Been Google!

A couple years ago, he got in a big fight with Apple when he dared to ask Steve Jobs for a slice of Apple's device sales in exchange for putting NBC shows on iTunes. Now he's gone off and an told PaidContent's Staci Kramer NBC's also-ran portal Snap.com could have been Google. Here's that bit from the intereview:

NBC had done a lot of things digitally before that but it seemed over the years that as many different strategies as people tried, NBC never nailed it.

Don’t forget. NBC had Snap. Had we not given up on Snap, the fate of the company might have been unbelievably different.

How so?

Who’s to say that Snap wasn’t Google?

I’m sure there are people over at Disney who wonder if Go was Google.

Snap was way ahead of its time.

Was the plug pulled too soon?

Obviously, in retrospect, yes but that’s unfair to say. It was just really ahead of its time.

Like us, you're probably wondering: What's Snap? Here's how NBC described the site in a press release from 1999:

Snap.com's Internet portal services offer users powerful ways to organize and find anything on the Internet. Snap.com's Internet portal services feature content from over 100 leading Web publishers and are distributed by more than 70 leading Internet Service Providers, telephone and communications companies, PC manufacturers and third-party marketers. At the heart of Snap.com's portal services is a directory of Web sites and over 500 resource centers, built by a team of editors and reviewers to ensure quality, freshness and usefulness. Users may either search the Snap directory by using keywords, or browse through the directory's 16 topic categories.